32 percent, while the World Health Organization
recommends a maximum of 15 percent in a population.

This phenomenon is part of a rapid shift from home
births that are attended by a village midwife to medicalized
hospital births. And, says Veile, as the hospital birth rate
goes up, maternal mortality usually goes down—definitely
a good thing. But infant mortality has not declined in
the Maya village since hospital births began, and she’s
discovered other consequences of this alteration in
birth practices.

Where she works, for example, women strongly prefer
vaginal births—in part because women provide farm labor,
and C-sections require a longer recovery period. Veile is
also exploring the rate of maternal infection following
C-sections, since village women are recovering in less
sanitary, tropical environments. “My guess would be that
issues with infection would be greater,” says Veile. “Plus,
they’re relatively poor, and they live far from hospitals.

And her most recent study, published in the American
Journal of Human Biology with colleague Karen Kramer,
of the University of Utah, demonstrates that cesarean-born Maya children have higher childhood body mass
than vaginally-born children, even when birthweight and
maternal size are taken into account. This may be because
children who are born via C-section miss the exposure
to “good bacteria” from a vaginal birth, which play
important roles in the development of immune function
and metabolism. Childhood obesity isn’t currently a
problem in the Maya village because infants are breastfed
and children’s diets consist of maize, beans, and vegetables.

While there’s nothing inherently feminist about
studying reproductive and developmental biology, says
Veile, biological processes unfold within a broader
context that can’t be ignored. “I think understanding how
women’s bodies respond biologically to different social
and environmental contexts gets ignored a lot in feminist
research—just the inevitability of what our bodies are
designed to do and how they work. I like to think that that’s
something that I bring in,” she says.

The future of feminism

In some ways, feminism’s future looks a lot like its past,though the issues it addresses do evolve. But the movementmust also embrace the system of interconnected socialand cultural identities we use to define ourselves. “We’rerefusing to forget how much work there is yet to be done,”writes Gay in Bad Feminist. “We’re refusing to relish thecomforts we have at the expense of the women who are stillseeking comfort.”And this openness is in large part the essence of BadFeminist. “The reality is that we’re always judging people’schoices, but as feminists, it is important to temper ourjudgment with empathy and an open mind,” says Gay.“Everyone comes to feminism from different places andcertainly, we have a few things in common, namely thefreedom of choice. Beyond that, women represent a reallydiverse group of people and we are going to make differentchoices and we are not always going to agree with eachother’s choices. We avoid excessive judgment by realizingthat most of us are doing the best we can.”